Aristide Economopoulos/The Star-LedgerWreckage from the crash is pulled out of the Hudson River across Sinatra Park in Hoboken in August 2009.
WASHINGTON — An air traffic controller at Teterboro Airport was trying to hold three conversations at once when he missed a critical error by a pilot who moments later crashed into a helicopter over the Hudson River, killing 9 people, according to documents released by federal investigators.

In an Air Traffic Control Factual Report, dated March 1 and released today by the National Transportation Safety Board, the NTSB said controller Carlyle Turner told investigators that after clearing the pilot for takeoff, he called an airport operations employee "to talk about a dead cat she had to deal with earlier that day."

The release of the documents was not accompanied by any conclusions by the NTSB assigning blame for the accident, and Keith Holloway, an NTSB spokesman, declined to characterize the significance of any new information revealed by the documents.

According to the factual report, Turner told NTSB investigators that while simultaneously communicating with his friend about the cat and with Piper pilot Steven Altman, he also kept an eye on and communicated with other traffic, including a helicopter in the area that was not involved in the crash, and with air traffic controllers from Newark Liberty International Airport.

In an interview torday, Holloway, the NTSB spokesman, specified that Turner called his friend on his personal cell phone and spoke to her about the cat on a headset. At the same time, Holloway said, the controller communicated with the pilot and Newark controllers via radio transmissions piped through control room speakers.

Turner is on administrative leave while he appeals his termination by the Federal Aviation Administration, which operates the nation’s air traffic control system. The FAA has implemented a series of reforms in response to the incident.

The agency declined to comment on the newly released documents. Doug Church, a spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, also declined to comment, other than to note that the NTSB did not issue any conclusions today. "There’s no findings, it’s just a release of documents," Church said.

At one point, today's report said, Turner noticed that the Piper had failed to turn southeast, and the air traffic controller instructed the pilot to do so. He also instructed the pilot to contact Newark on a specific radio frequency. At that very moment, however, Turner told investigators he heard Newark controllers tell him something that he could not make out, prompting him to call them back.

What Newark had called about, documents said, was whether Turner was in communication with the pilot, who apparently had not been tuned in to the proper radio frequency moments before the crash.

In his account of the communications leading up to the crash that Turner provided to investigators, he makes no mention of the pilot’s incorrect readback of the radio frequency — a widely publicized error revealed previously in a transcript of the communications.

Arthur Wolk, an aviation lawyer who has listened to an actual recording of the communications, said there was so much static it would have easy for the pilot to misunderstand the frequency. Likewise, Wolk said, it would have been just as easy for the controller to miss entirely the pilot’s incorrect readback, especially if other people were talking to him at the same time.

"Anybody would miss a readback on that tape," said Wolk, who had represented the pilot’s widow in lawsuits against the FAA and other parties, but is no longer involved in the suits. Referring to the controller’s apparent failure to hear the pilot’s incorrect readback of the frequency, Wolk said, "The bottom line of the story is, if he had heard it, he would have given him the correct frequency."